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		<h1><a href="/us">govdoc.org</a></h1>
		<h2>by a horde of rampaging robots loosed upon the tubes</h2>
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          <h1 class="title">About govdoc.org</h1>
          <p>
            Govdoc.org was founded by <a href="http://www.friedo.com/">Mike Friedman</a> and launched on July 4, 2009. It is
            currently in a state of constant development and is woefully incomplete.
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            The goals of Govdoc.org are threefold:
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            <li>The myriad agencies of the US federal government publish millions of pages of original material every year. The
              government has been slow to make this material available online, and what material is available is spread accross thousands of different
              government websites, with little or no centralized indexing or tracking. Using a number of specialized HTTP robots, Govdoc.org collects original, public-domain works of the US federal government in one place, where they can be browsed, searched and tagged by anyone.</li>
            <li>The vast majority of material published by the government is in the form of unsemantic, inaccessible formats like PDF files, Excel spreadsheets, and scanned images. By combining OCR and automated document conversion technology with specific extraction heuristics, Govdoc.org hopes to transform as much collected information as possible into fully semantic XHTML documents which can be read equally well by humans and computer programs.</li>
            <li>Govdoc.org aims to form a community of programmers, researchers, journalists, legal professionals and others who
              find this site and its content useful. Look for an announcement soon about a limited beta for Govdoc.org&apos;s 
              community tools.</li>
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	<p id="legal">Documents published on this site are public domain works of the United States federal government and are 
not restricted by copyright. 
    Original content &copy; 2009 govdoc.org. CSS template designed by <a href="http://www.freecsstemplates.org/">Free CSS Templates</a> and <a href="http://www.freecsstemplates.org/license/">licensed</a> under the 
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